Making Jesus the Messiah: Saint Paul and the God-Fearers-A Market View

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Summary: Christianity's Origins and Today's Marketing Know-how
Review: An intriguing, highly plausible theory of how Christianity was created by Jews, but only succeeded outside the Jewish faith. The teachings of Jesus were not embraced by the community in which he was born. To be a Jewish Christian you had to keep ALL the laws, including the restrictive dietary ones, and be circumcised. Tough requirements. To be a Gentile (Pauline) Christian you only needed to have faith. This ultimately made for a winning marketing strategy. This superbly researched, thoughtful book will rattle traditionalists -- though not scholar's -- cages. Clear on the impossibility of ever knowing if a man named Jesus even existed, the author elects to write with the working assumption that he did. He then traces the struggle between James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, the newcomer from the north in their fight to create a new religion, something that Jesus himself never even considered. There were compromises, but Paul gradually began to win the day. First James ceded interest in Gentiles, the largest market, to Paul. Paul had the energy and drive to grow the numbers of people embracing his religious ideas. He made conversion easy for men by dropping circumcision, replacing it with the far easier to take baptism. As an outsider he was not hung up on the issue of Jerusalem. He had no notion of exclusivity and embraced all peoples -- Jew, Gentile, Greek or Roman -- who could be reached from within the Roman Empire. And then the roof fell in on the Jewish Christians directed from Jerusalem. The city was destroyed during the first Jewish revolt, and no Second Coming occurred to save them. James's hope for "his" religion, and James himself, died as a result of the revolt. Paul's Gentile Christians thrived in the wake of their adversary's destruction. The religion Paul invented would rise to become the most powerful monotheistic religion in the world. If you share the author's fascination with this topic, buy the book. His scholarship is excellent, and it's a darn good read.